Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Fact-Checking Is Not Enough

By Ross Douthat August 8, 2012 12:32 amAugust 8, 2012 12:32 am

The speaker is a Midwestern Everyman: White, balding, deep in middle age, with hollows around his eyes. He sits at a kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee, talking about what happened after Bain Capital closed down his steel plant in 2001. He lost his job; his family lost its health insurance. His wife felt lousy but didn’t go to the doctor, to spare the family worry and expense. When she finally ended up in the hospital, the diagnosis was cancer. She had 22 days to live.

“I do not think Mitt Romney realizes what he’s done to anyone,” the man says at the end. “And furthermore I do not think Mitt Romney is concerned.”

That advertisement, paid for by the pro-Obama “super PAC” Priorities USA, was released on Tuesday morning. By midday the political press had subjected it to a fact-check and reported that not only was Romney no longer in charge of day-to-day decisions at Bain by the time the steel plant closed down, but the man’s wife – his name is Joe Soptic, hers was Ranae – actually died in 2006, nearly five years after the original layoff.

By the evening the debunking had gone further. CNN contacted Soptic himself for comment, and the former steelworker acknowledged that his wife had actually continued to have insurance of her own after he was laid off, and only lost her coverage more than a year later, when she left her own job because of an injury. What the ad had portrayed as cause-and-effect — Romney closed Joe Soptic’s plant, Ranae Soptic died — was a tenuous-to-nonexistent connection.

It is possible, just possible, that the speed and scope of this debunking has been sufficient to thoroughly blunt the advertisement’s reach, or perhaps even knock it out of circulation completely. If so, the ad-makers working for Priorities USA will have achieved an extraordinarily rare feat: They will have created an attack ad so preposterous that it can be swatted down by media fact-checkers.

This almost never happens. Instead, even when they’re crossing lines and peddling inaccuracies, the makers of negative ads generally welcome criticism from the press, because criticism equals coverage, and even critical coverage expands the advertisement’s reach.

Related

Reporters understand how this process works, but they’ve usually been helpless to do anything about it. The first iconic negative ad of the television era, Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy” spot, aired only once in 1964, but its implied message — that Barry Goldwater would take the United States into a global thermonuclear war — was only amplified by the media coverage of the controversy over its legitimacy and tone.

The same thing happened a generation later, when journalistic watchdogs parsed Republican ads on crime and welfare and affirmative action for racism and crypto-racist appeals. These efforts made TV spots like the 1988 Willie Horton ad and Jesse Helms’s 1990 “white-hands” ad infamous among liberals, but they didn’t prevent them from being devastatingly effective with the voting public.

In the Internet era, the number of would-be watchdogs and fact-checking teams has proliferated, but the same problems remain. It isn’t just that even hostile media coverage tends to just widen an attack ad’s audience. It’s also that the interpretation of advertisements often has more in common with cultural criticism than it does with rigorous magazine fact-checking, which makes it hard for even the most down-the-middle reporter to define what counts as fair.

Sometimes this manifests itself in straightforward political bias. In a lengthy critique of “non-partisan” outlets like Politifact last winter, The Weekly Standard’s Mark Hemingway argued persuasively that their ostensibly neutral analysis often feels more “a rearguard action to keep inconvenient truths” – mostly the ones that favor conservatives – “out of the conversation.”

But even when outright bias doesn’t intrude, the problem of interpretation remains. Reporters can check the date of Ranae Soptic’s death and the details of her coverage, but there’s no purely disinterested answer to the question of whether a businessman can be blamed for a layoff’s human toll, any more than there was a purely factual answer to the question of whether it was racist to show Willie Horton’s mug shot in 1988.

This means that with rare exceptions, viewers and voters, not reporters and pundits, will always get the final say on whether a particular advertisement crosses a line.

And the press needs to learn to trust them with it. Negative ads will always be a feature of American politics, and voters have generally shown good judgment about what counts as a legitimate issue and what doesn’t.

The Willie Horton ad worked, for instance, because it was clearly linked to Dukakis’s own policy positions, and to the then-pressing issue of liberalism’s abject failure to deal with rising crime rates. The late-in-the-game ads attempting to tie Barack Obama to the former Weatherman Bill Ayers in 2008, on the other hand, fell flat because they weren’t tied to any of the major issues at stake in the campaign.

Even before its details were debunked, my instinct was that the anti-Romney cancer spot fell squarely into the latter category – not because jobs and health care don’t matter in 2012, but because there’s only so far over the top you can go before voters tune you out.

If I’m right, conservatives should save their outrage: Even if the media’s fact-checkers can’t quite close the book on this particular exercise in demagoguery, the wisdom of the American people will finish what they started.

What's Next

About

Weekly pieces by the Op-Ed columnists Charles Blow and Ross Douthat, as well as regular posts from contributing writers like Thomas B. Edsall and Timothy Egan. This is also the place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election. Yes, everything: the candidates, the states, the caucuses, the issues, the rules, the controversies, the primaries, the ads, the electorate, the present, the past and even the future.